This blog is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to
transform schooling as we know it, to help all students realise their
talents, passions and dreams. Be great to hear from anyone out there! Feel free to add a comment to Bruce's Blog and enter e-mail to receive postings

Just when I thought we'd reached peak madness,
this arrived. Warning - you’ll
need a strong stomach before reading this.

“What
kind of message does this send to students? I wondered. That their teachers are
so incompetent that they need an ear piece and 3 people sharing a walkie talkie
in the corner to tell them what to say?”

“You
don’t have to be an accomplished
educator or a Nobel-prize winning economist to understand the benefits of familial
engagement in education. Imagine the dollars saved if more families volunteered
for projects involving our schools, the benefits of having more people to read,
tutor and mentor and the positive long-term economic boost from smarter, more
successful students which, in turn, would strengthen public education.”

“When
parents have tended to do the stuff of life for kids—the
waking up, the transporting, the reminding about deadlines and obligations, the
bill-paying, the question-asking, the decision-making, the
responsibility-taking, the talking to strangers, and the confronting of
authorities, kids may be in for quite a shock when parents turn them loose in
the world of college or work. They will experience setbacks, which will feel to
them like failure. Lurking beneath the problem of whatever thing needs to be
handled is the student’s inability to
differentiate the self from the parent.”

“Parents,
I urge you to let your kids create and learn as kids. As hard as it can be to
step back and watch it happen, it is SO important to the learning process and
as it turns out, to mental health. Kids need to experience safe failures in
order to learn that they are resilient. Kids need to see what they alone are
capable of. They need to have the opportunity to learn independently. They need
to know that they can improve because they want to.”

I”t’s the last day of school for my
lazy, lyingwife. She says teachers still have to go to work, but that can’t be right. Teachers only work when the kids are at school. I wish
she would come clean and

admit she is not really a teacher.School starts around 9:00 and dismisses at 3:45. She leaves the house before seven each morning, and it’s only a fifteen or twenty minute drive to the “school” where she “teaches.” She
comes home around six or six-thirty in the evening. Sometimes later. What is
she doing with all the extra time?”

“Mr.
Gates, you swing a lot of weight in political circles. If you told policymakers
that the current thrust of reform was blocking alternative ways of improving
learner performance, and educators should have enough autonomy to explore those
alternatives, those of us who have been working on them for decades might have
a chance to show what’s possible.”

Real Education Still Matters: Exposing
the Limits and Myths of 'Market Forces' Education.

Bruce’s latest
posting, referencing an article by Peter W. Cookson Jr

“The rise of instrumentalism in
education.”

“Like those imprisoned in Plato’s Cave, learners who do not have the opportunity to experience free
inquiry are vulnerable to the one-dimensional images and stereotypes produced
by much of the media and publishing world. The learner is hobbled, even
crippled, as she or he travels the developmental path of self-discovery and
critical consciousness. This disempowering of mind produces tunnel social vision.”

Twelve must read books on education for
2015.Worth reading the information about each book to give you a sense of
future directions. First in the list is a new book by Sir Ken Robinson. What
books are you aware of that could be added to the list?

The industrial age placed efficiency number
one. As Henry Ford, inventor of the assembly line, famously said ‘ you
can have your car painted in any colour as long as it is black.’Todayaesthetic design is an important factor. Would seem to
apply to schools as well – a need to move from ‘one
size fits’ all standardisation to the
personalisation of learning. Schools need to teach and

implement design skills.

“Yetour generation’s greatest entrepreneur,Steve
Jobs, considered design so important that hecited a
calligraphy course as his most important influence. For him, design wasn’t just a product’s look and feel, but its function. Over the past 20 years, we’ve seena radical shift toward design as a
fundamental source of value. It used to be that design was a
relatively narrow field, but today it’s become central to product performance and everybody needs to be
design literate.”

“Over the years I have become increasingly aware of the different
ideas people hold about teaching( in today’s terminology ‘mind-sets')

It is also obvious that many teachers
hold these ‘mind-sets' unconsciously – it is just
the way they have learnt to do things. When asked about the beliefs that
underpin their teaching many such teachers find it hard to move beyond
platitudes or clichés. And when they can, all too often, their
actions do not match their words.”

Wise words from the past – as
relevant as ever. This old blog featuresideas
about creativity by Jerome Bruner from a little known book of his I picked up years
ago called Essays for the Left

Hand. It has become one of my favourite books
although a number of his essays are a little beyond me. His ideas on creativity
are spot on.

“Conditions for creativity require that the learner stand back from
reality and to be 'prepared to take his journey without maps' driven by a deep
need, or passion, to understand something. The 'wild flood of ideas' need to be
tamed, and in the process, the thing being created takes over and compels the
learner to finish. The learner, Bruner writes, is 'dominated' to complete the
task.”

“Relating back to the ideas of John Dewey he believes that if people
are to live democratic lives they must have the opportunity to learn what that
way of life means. His ideas are based on the ability of students to
participate in their own education. Democratic schools share a child centred
approach but their larger goal is to change the undemocratic conditions of
school themselves and in turn to reach out to the wider community.”

Seymour Sarason is seen by educationalist
Robert Fried as a ‘cautious radical’ and a pragmatic
idealist who staunchly defends classroom teachers in one breathe and scolds
them in another for their failure to make schools interesting places for
teachers and children. Fried believes we should take him seriously. For sixty
years Sarasan has agonized about why our institutions and social systems so
rarely succeeded in achieving the visions of those who created them despite the
hard work and sincere efforts of all involved. Sarason has relentlessly
challenged conventional thinking about why schools seem so resistant to change.Sarason has interesting ideas about school culture – well
worth a read.